Charles Mackay(1814–1889)

Charles Mackay was born at 12 King Edward Street in Perth on 27 March 1814, only son of George Mackay, a Royal Navy lieutenant of the Mackay-of-Strathnaver Highland line who had served the Copenhagen action of 1801 and the Trafalgar action of 1805 under Nelson and was on the Royal Navy half-pay list from 1815, and Amelia Cargill, a Perth lawyer's daughter. His mother died of post-childbed complications when he was four months old. His father raised him alone at Perth and from 1818 at a lodging-house in Brompton, west London, taken on a Greenwich Hospital naval-discharge clerkship the half-pay had let him buy. He was schooled at the Royal Caledonian Asylum in Holloway, north London (the charity-foundation school for the poor sons of Scottish soldiers and sailors), and from thirteen at the Académie privée at Brussels for two years of French-language education.

He came home to London at fifteen in 1829 and took his first paid job as a junior reporter on the *Sun* daily evening newspaper. The 1830s and 1840s London daily-newspaper-and-magazine market was the foundational ground of the popular-journalism career of the period: the penny-stamp newspapers, the monthly literary-and-political magazines like *Bentley's Miscellany* and *Fraser's Magazine*, and the new weekly-illustrated papers like the *Illustrated London News* (founded 1842 under his editorial direction across its first eighteen months). He worked across the London journalism market of the 1830s and 1840s as a sub-editor, leader-writer, parliamentary sketch reporter and book-review editor, on the piecework-rate basis of the pre-1855 newspaper trade.

*Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds*, the three-volume 1841 collection of popular-historical essays, was the breakout work. The three volumes (the first on the great financial-speculative bubbles of the past three centuries; the second on alchemists, fortune-tellers and prophets; the third on the witch-hunts, crusades and religious revivals) ran as a popular-history anatomy of the phenomenon the subtitle named: the collective folly under which large groups of individually-rational people periodically and predictably go mad. The first chapter on the Mississippi Company bubble of 1719 to 1720 (the John Law Paris-system collapse), the second on the 1720 South Sea Bubble (the London joint-stock-bubble that destroyed half the English landed gentry of the period), and the third on the 1636 to 1637 Dutch Tulip Mania were the three chapters that the modern behavioural-finance literature has continuously cited as the case-studies of speculative-asset-bubble behaviour for the hundred and eighty-four years since the book was published. *Memoirs* has been continuously in print since 1841 and is, by the consensus of the modern financial-services publishing market, the best-selling popular-finance book of the nineteenth century by a substantial margin.

He published a substantial body of other work across the next forty years that has not survived in the same way. *The Salamandrine* (1842), a long narrative poem in the Coleridgean register; *Egeria, or the Spirit of Nature* (1850); the *History of the Mormons* (1851), the first English-language popular history of the Latter-Day Saints based on a research trip across the United States in 1850; the *Memoirs of the Pretender* (1856), a popular account of the Jacobite risings on the model of the Walter Scott historical-fiction tradition; and the *Forty Years' Recollections of Life, Literature, and Public Affairs* (1877), the memoir of his journalistic career. He served as the *Times*'s special correspondent in the United States through the early years of the American Civil War, 1862 to 1865, based in New York; the correspondence was favourable to the Confederacy and was, in the post-war assessment of the *Times*'s American coverage, the source of the paper's continuing pro-Confederate editorial line through the war years.

He married Rosa Henrietta Vale in 1834 (she died in 1859 of tuberculosis), then Mary Elizabeth Mills in 1861 (the second marriage ended in separation in 1865 on the strain of his American Civil War absence). The American correspondent and writer Marie Corelli (whose actual surname was Mackay, born Mary Mackay) was his daughter by Mary Mills, raised under his sole care after the separation. He died of pneumonia at his Wandsworth house on 24 December 1889, seventy-five years old, and is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in west London. The Mackay name in the Scottish-side catalogue is the Highland clan surname of Strathnaver, the most northerly of the major Highland clans, holding the country between Cape Wrath and Sutherland from the eleventh century; he carried the Perth lieutenant's-son variant of it from the Royal Caledonian Asylum into one of the most-cited popular-finance texts of the English language.